Should Government Bureaucracies Be Relocated Outside the Beltway? December 3, 2019 by Dan Mitchell

An utterly depressing statistic is that the Washington, D.C.-area is now the richest region of the country.

At the risk of understatement, that wealth is largely unearned. It’s mostly a reflection of overpaid bureaucrats, greedy politicians, fat-cat lobbyists, beltway-bandit contractors, and other insiders who have their snouts buried in the federal trough.

I’m not a fan of class warfare, but there’s one exception: It’s galling that lower-income and middle-class taxpayers across the nation are subsidizing a gilded class in Washington.

That’s the type of redistribution that should be ended first.

So what can be done to address this inequity? Is there an approach that will curtail D.C.’s entitled, self-aggrandizing elite?

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Terry Wanzek, a state legislator from North Dakota, makes the case for new legislation that would shift government bureaucracies from Washington to the hinterland.

The Hawley-Blackburn bill calls for moving Agriculture and its more than 100,000 employees to Missouri. Other departments would go elsewhere: Commerce to Pennsylvania, Education to Tennessee, Energy to Kentucky, Health and Human Services to Indiana, Housing and Urban Development to Ohio, Interior to New Mexico, Labor to West Virginia, Transportation to Michigan, and Veterans Affairs to South Carolina. …The bill’s sponsors pitch their legislation as an employment program…but the main benefit would come from putting regulators into proximity with the people whose lives and businesses they regulate. …This would be a government “of the people”—something that is lacking as the administrative state inexorably grows in Washington, D.C.

This is an interesting proposal. But does that mean it’s a good idea?

Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is not overly impressed.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, he opines that it would backfire.

The bill’s sponsors, Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, would send the Agriculture and Education departments to their respective states. Eight other federal departments and most nondepartment agencies would also be dispersed throughout the land, often to places intended to suit their functions—for example, the Transportation Department would be sent to Michigan to be near the auto industry. …The only understandable part of this plan is conservatives’ visceral desire for revenge. People across the county can see the massive houses Washington bureaucrats and consultants occupy, walled off in single-party strongholds like Fairfax, Va. …But since when did Republicans accept the idea that the federal government ought to be a premier job creator? The GOP insisted for decades that many New Deal agencies and subsequent government bodies should never have been created in the first place, and that their red tape and interference is a dominant cause of economic inefficiency. …It will be impossible to uproot or at least prune the bureaucracy once its seeds are spread to every state. …Would legislators from the “lucky” chosen states ever have the gumption to slash funding from agencies that employ thousands of their constituents and pay them generously? The HIRE Act would tie Middle America inextricably to big progressive government, remaking America in Washington’s image.

So who is right?

I wrote about this topic back in 2016.

Part of me liked the idea, though mostly for punitive reasons.

…it wouldn’t be a bad idea. …locate some bureaucracies in the dodgy parts of cities such as Detroit. Especially departments such as HUD and HHS since they helped cause the economic misery in inner cities. And the Department of Education could be placed somewhere like Newark where government-run schools are such awful failures.

But I concluded it would be a bad idea.

Shouldn’t we focus on shutting down counterproductive bureaucracies rather than moving them? …If we move bureaucracies (whether they are necessary ones or useless ones), does that create the risk of giving other parts of the nation a “public-choice” incentive to lobby for big government since they’ll be recipients of federal largesse? Will we simply get duplication, meaning a new bureaucracy somewhere in America without ever really getting rid of the original bureaucracy in Washington, DC?

So I’m siding with Mr. Crews over Mr. Wanzek.

P.S. I’ve already identified bureaucracies that should be terminated.

• Get rid of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• Shut down the Department of Agriculture.
• Eliminate the Department of Transportation.
• Abolish the Department of Education.
• Pull the plug on the Department of Energy.
• Phase out the Department of Veterans Affairs.
• Privatize the Postal Service.
• Dump the Small Business Administration.

Looking at this list, it reminds me that I need to make the case for the abolition of some other bureaucracies.